The days are getting longer, but the media shadows are no shorter as
they cover the war in Iraq through American eyes, squinting in
Washington’s pallid sun.

Debated as an issue of politics, the actual war keeps being drained
of life. Abstractions thrive inside the Beltway, while the war effort
continues: funded by the U.S. Treasury every day, as the original
crime of invasion is replicated with occupation.

More than ever, in the aftermath of the Scooter Libby verdict, the
country’s major news outlets are willing to acknowledge that the
political road to war in Iraq was paved with deceptions. But the same
media outlets were integral to laying the flagstones along the path to war
— and they’re now integral to prolonging the war.

With the same logic of one, two, and three years ago, the conformist
media wisdom is that a cutoff of funds for the war is not practical.
Likewise, on Capitol Hill, there’s a lot of huffing and puffing about how
the war must wind down — but the money for it, we’re told, must keep
moving. Like two rails along the same track, the dispensers of
conventional media and political wisdom carry us along to more and more
and more war.

The antiwar movement is now coming to terms with measures being
promoted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi and Reid have a job to do. The antiwar movement has a job to
do. The jobs are not the same.

This should be obvious — but, judging from public and private
debates now fiercely underway among progressive activists and
organizations, there’s a lot of confusion in the air.

No amount of savvy Capitol-speak can change the fact that
“benchmarks” are euphemisms for more war. And when activists pretend
otherwise, they play into the hands of those who want the war to go on...
and on... and on.

Deferring to the Democratic leadership means endorsing loopholes that
leave the door wide open for continued U.S. military actions inside Iraq
— whether justified as attacks on fighters designated as Al
Qaeda in Iraq, or with reclassification of U.S. forces as “trainers”
rather than “combat troops.” And an escalating U.S. air war could
continue to bomb Iraqi neighborhoods for years.

The position being articulated by Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters,
Lynn Woolsey and others in Congress is the one that the antiwar
movement should unite behind — to fully fund bringing the troops
home in a safe and orderly way, while ending the entire U.S.
occupation and war effort, by the end of 2007.

We’re urged to take solace from the fact that Washington’s debate has
shifted to “when” — rather than “whether” — the war should end. But the
end of the U.S. war effort could be deferred for many more years while
debates over “when” flourish and fester. This happened during the Vietnam
War, year after year, while death came to tens of
thousands more American soldiers and perhaps a million more
Vietnamese people.

Pelosi is speaker of the House, and Reid is majority leader of the
Senate. But neither speaks for, much less leads, the antiwar movement that
we need.

When you look at the practicalities of the situation, Pelosi and Reid
could be more accurately described as speaker and leader for the
war-management movement.

A historic tragedy is that the most hefty progressive organization,
MoveOn, seems to have wrapped itself around the political
sensibilities of Reid, Pelosi and others at the top of Capitol Hill
leadership. Deference to that leadership is a big mistake. We already have
a Democratic Party. Over time, a vibrant progressive group loses vibrance
by forfeiting independence and becoming a virtual appendage of party
leaders.

Last week, while MoveOn was sending out a mass e-mail to its 3.2
million members offering free bumper stickers urging “End This War,” the
MoveOn leadership was continuing its failure to back the efforts of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus for “a fully funded, and
systematic, withdrawal of U.S. soldiers and military contractors from Iraq.”

There are rationales for uniting behind practical measures, and
sometimes they make sense. But the MoveOn pattern has been unsettling and
recurring. Power brokerage is not antiwar leadership.

The U.S. Constitution and the federal courts are clear: Only through
the “power of the purse” can Congress end a war. It’s good to see
MoveOn churning out bumper stickers that advocate an end to the Iraq war
— but sad to see its handful of decision-makers failing to
support a measure to fund an orderly and prompt withdrawal from the war.

On Capitol Hill, most Democrats seem to have settled on a tactical
approach of simultaneously ratifying and deploring the continuation of the
war. The approach may or may not be savvy politics in a narrow sense of
gaining temporary partisan political advantage. But it is ultimately
destructive to refuse to do the one thing that the
Constitution empowers Congress to do to halt a U.S. war — stop
appropriating taxpayer money for it.

In retrospect, such congressional behavior during the Vietnam War —
while attracting sober approval from much of the era’s punditocracy —
ended up prolonging a horrific war that could have ended years
sooner. Now, as then, pandering to the news media and other powerful
pressures, most politicians are busy trying to pick “low-hanging
fruit” that turns out to be poisonous.

“Somehow this madness must cease,” Martin Luther King Jr. said 40
years ago about the Vietnam War. “We must stop now.”

Was the situation then essentially different from today? No.

“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims
of our nation and for those it calls enemy,” King said. And: “We are now
faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted
with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and
history there is such a thing as being too late.”

When King denounced “the madness of militarism,” he wasn’t trying to
cozy up to the majority leader of the Senate or impress the House
speaker with how he could deliver support. He was speaking
truthfully, and he was opposing a war forthrightly. That was
imperative in 1967. It is imperative in 2007.

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

"Of course people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."